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Jim Carroll

Music, Life and everything else

The reading list

My man Jermaine Dupri has got Jay-Z’s back over the “American Gangster” and iTunes schmoozle. Dupri notes in this blog that Jay-Z won’t be the last artist to believe that an album shouldn’t be pimped out track by track I …

I believe he’s starting a movement that’s necessary. More artists and producers are gonna take back control of how their art is sold because his strategy has paid off. Maybe Hova coulda sold another 100,000 to 200,000 units by playing it iTunes’ way, but he still had the number one album last week. He STILL sold 425,000 units. Even more, he’s proven you can still sell an album without those guys.

Karen Miller, 53 years old, saw her first “freak dance” four years ago when she was chaperoning a high-school dance attended by her freshman daughter. One boy was up close to a girl’s back, bumping and grinding to the pounding beat of the music. “I thought, ‘That’s just dadgum nasty,’” Ms. Miller recalls. “It really had me sick to my stomach.”